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What is allReady

While we can’t stop disasters from happening, we can lessen their impact on our families and the communities we live in by being prepared. Preparedness is a key factor in reducing impacts and together citizens & organizations can build resilient communities. No one can eliminate disasters, but together we can be ready to be safer, save lives and recover faster when the unexpected happens.

allReady brings together community members, volunteers, humanitarian and community organizations to make our communities more resilient to the effects of disasters by making preparedness activities more visible and effective to the communities they serve and the volunteers who support them.

In fact, allReady itself came from a group of folks across non-profits, software organizations and open source communities who volunteered to work together to build a solution to connect communities with opportunities to prepare, bringing communities and volunteers together, and increasing community preparedness.

Contributing to and Using allReady

At the moment, we are working on getting allReady to a 'v1' for initial release and use by community and non-profit organizations. When we are ready to go live we will update this page and announce it on our website and twitter account. In the meantime, checkout the repository mentioned above (in particular the issue and milestone lists) to see what what issues and features we are planning to release and suggest features/requirements for us to build with our community of volunteers.

This repo contains the code for allReady, an open-source solution focused on increasing awareness, efficiency and impact of preparedness campaigns as they are delivered by humanitarian and disaster response organizations in local communities.

Project overview

allReady is focused on increasing awareness, efficiency and impact of preparedness campaigns as they are delivered by humanitarian and disaster response organizations in local communities. As preparedness and resliency of a community increases the potential for impactful disasters (both large and small) is greatly decreased. The rule of thumb in the industry is that an hour or dollar spent before a disaster is worth 15-30 afterwards. However preparedness activities, like ensuring working smoke detectors are in homes, are often not as visible or emotionally salient as saving children from a burning building - for example. Theh goal of allReady - in part - is to grow awareness and engagement of communities and volunteers in preparedness campaigns to grow their impact and - aspirationally - "put disaster response out of business" through communities that are fully prepared and reslient to inevitable disasters.

To learn more about the need for allReady, the technologies, and how the app came together, view the project information and blog post on the Humanitarian Toolbox website and watch the In the Code video series:

This project, which was jumpstarted by volunteers at Microsoft, has been turned over to Humanitarian Toolbox so that it can be maintained and improved by the technical community at large and ultimately deployed in support of organizations delivering preparedness campaigns everywhere.

How you can help

To help make improvements to this project, you can just clone this repository and start coding, testing, and/or designing.

Before jumping in, please review the solution architecture and instructions below to get started.

As of this writing (week of 7/20/2015), we are focused on expanding and filling out our documentation, issues lists, milestones plan and supporting any issues that arise as the community first starts to engage with the codebase. Soon in addition to the codebase you should be able to find issues of all types (simple bugs, new feature & requirements and architectural updates) upon which you can contribute to the project. In the meantime, if you find any issues with the codebase or other content in our repository please log an issue and we will work with you to solve it.

Thank you for considering supporting this open source project for humanitarian support.

Solution architecture

The allReady application is implemented as a Visual Studio 2015 solution that contains two projects: an ASP.NET 5 project that serves the web site and admin portal, and a cross-platform Cordova app project. The web application also exposes the REST APIs used by the mobile app to access data.

Web Application

An ASP.NET 5 web application provides the front-end web experience for volunteers accessing the allReady web site and the portal used by administrators. The site is powered by ASP.NET MVC 6 using .NET 4.6 and a dependency on .NET 4.5.1. Here's the landing page for the web site: